How AI Is Changing Small Business for Dyslexic Entrepreneurs

Welcome to the Dyslexic entrepreneur. In today's podcast, I want to share my state of the nation. This is kind of where I see entrepreneurs working, what's happening in the current state. And so real update as of today, you know this, I record my podcasts and release them pretty quickly. So this will have been recorded a day out from release. And so this is very fresh and I kind of want to talk about what I'm seeing in my local economy, what I'm seeing internationally with what I'm keeping up with and where I think people are a bit blind.

So it's going to be a bit of a general podcast. I just want to, I don't want to use this to frighten people, but I want to use this to make people aware of what is changing because if we don't see this, it's going to hit some people with like a bag of bricks. So let's dive into today's podcast. OK, So what really led me to this was actually Mother's Day of all things that made me want to do this podcast. I was sitting around on Saturday, which is the day before Mother's Day, which is a Sunday, and I was talking to my 9 1/2 year old stepdaughter. She wanted to print something for her mom.

She wanted to print some coupons for her for Mother's Day and she found something on Pinterest that looked amazing. There were 10 coupons, really well designed, beautiful, beautiful looking things. Now she sent me that image of what she wanted. Now, within seconds, I put that into chair GPT, which has the best image model that I've found for the price and speed and everything else. I told it that I wanted to use her name and and the daughter's name, and seconds later it had produced a perfect image listening exactly what I'd asked it to do. It used thinking mode.

It thought about it and created it. Another 30 seconds later, I'd asked it to turn that into a print ready PDF, which it did. And we headed up to the local print shop because we wanted some nice fancy paper. You know, we love I love Holly. So we wanted to do something a little special and we'd get some nice, nice printing there in color because we don't even have a color printer these days. You know, I don't really use printers as much as we used to.

So we went up there, we printed it off and they were perfect. Now that took me two prompts to get from idea or you know, inspiration to outcome. Now that's pretty crazy right? We also did a poster for Mila's room in a three same concept. Found something on Pinterest, we changed a couple of colours and the name on it looked amazing and produced an A3 print quality ready PDF that could be printed out and it was perfect. So in my opinion, graphic design is dead.

Now, don't get me wrong, it's probably going to take a few years for it to completely die off as a profession, but I would not be studying graphic design at all. You know, it's, it's, don't get me wrong, understanding design aesthetics can be used in other parts of life. So if you're a product manager, if you're a business owner, it's good to understand the basics of design. If you're a product designer, of course there's going to be use for you. But as a, as a hands on graphic designer, I just think their role is their role is gone. You know, it is just, it's dead.

And again, it'll take a while for it people to catch up with this. But AI has replaced it. You know, anyone with a brain can use AI. I think Canva could be in a bit of trouble long term if they don't get the head around this. But a general purpose AI tool has, in my business replaced a graphic designer. And it's just the truth.

It's not trying to be mean, but this is just where the way the world is going. In the old days, when I was younger, I used to try and fight the stuff and say, hey, we need to fight this and people don't need to lose jobs. And, but let's be honest, this is going to happen one way or the other. You know, my web design agency, like that's what my my main core business has been for years. It's probably got maybe one to three years in its current format to go before it probably starts to really Peter off. We're starting to use different technology as we speak to improve things, to get better outcomes.

I'm still finding with web design itself, we need, you still need someone to kind of run the system. And it's not as simple as saying I'll build me a website and AI builds a great website. It doesn't quite happen yet, but I'd be foolish to think that at some point in the next 6 months, 12 months, three years, that's not going to be solved for. And it's intriguing to watch it happen in front of my eyes. And I could sit here and just kind of still get enough work to survive for now and to tick along, or I could open my eyes to change. And the reason I wanted to bring this up as an entrepreneurial point of view is being a business owner.

You know, I've gone through different iterations of what I've done, different systemizations, different things. And what am I seeing that I think might still work is, is until we get to this, this mythical AGI. And to me, everyone's got a different kind of explanation of what AGI is like. This is general intelligence. You know, someone said it to me really well. It's kind of real proactive intelligence to me is, is one of those where it can look at a business holistically and it can make proactive steps to create something.

Now people kind of have this working in different ways, using things called Cron jobs and heartbeats and and stuff. But it's it's a real tacky way of doing it. It's not quite what we're talking about. Like they keep talking about conscious AI. Who knows? That will come, what it'll look like.

All we know is we have created intelligence and intelligence is getting even more intelligent. Yeah, I still think there's a breakthrough or two to come before we get to this next level when that maybe is one year away. It could be 10 years away. We don't know, but we're tracking that direction and the tools that have been created are game changing. And So what should you do? Like if I was at school right now, I don't know if I'm honest.

I think learning how to how to use relationships, you know, how to be good in relationships with people, how to build soft skills are probably more important than hard skills. I think it's really going to be important to understand like we're who I think really going to succeed in the short term at least are going to be generalists, people that know a lot about a little because AI can fill the gaps of that lot. And the people that can also see, you know, and where I see dyslexic thinkers really working here, people that can see systems and spatial kind of thought process. They can see how business models, systems start to finish and can help to engineer that type of thing. You know, more and more the stuff I'm doing in my business is I've kind of got two or three different things running at the moment and without AII, don't think I could run them. My team as well, the guys that you know I love dearly, but not always that I always get it right the first time.

AI is really supporting them with a level of additional intelligence that's been super helpful and I'm seeing some real great results. And I, I do think entrepreneurs have a good chance at the moment in this Wild West zone to create things that have never been created before. There are things that truly were not efficient before AI that someone may have created it or done it and gone. That's really cool. But you know, it would be really valuable if we could do it for $20 a time versus it's going to cost $500 every time we do it. I, I think that is actually where the magic's going to happen is things that have already been invented and it already exists in business, but we're just so inefficient to do now are efficient.

Now you can apply some intelligence to it, basically buy intelligence to automate systems that just work. I also think like if you're thinking about if you're thinking entrepreneurs side of the world, which is what I am always thinking. I also think there's going to be a huge place for middle men in the future. People that sit between the consumer and an outcome that add a layer of simplicity or relationship or a layer of smarts to what already exists, which is the old adage of buy cheap, sell higher or buy cheap, add some value and then sell higher. That added value layer. If you can come up with something that's unique, something that's that works, there's a real opportunity.

And I think we live in this world and I've been thinking about this for years. Like if you think back 50-60 years, people like did a lot of work in their communities. Places were a lot more localized. You, you kind of had a small business and you had a number of clients that were in the region around you. Transport just wasn't as easy as it is today. I kind of see this from a digital online world now is that you could have a business with 300 to 500 clients in a specific niche that could be all over the world in a real micro niche.

And that could be your little small business. Like it's, I see it in the marketing industry a lot where a little agency might have 100 to 200 clients floating around doing a bunch of things for making enough money to keep the business running and doing pretty well. And I see that happening a lot more in different industries because it's going to just become simpler, right? Like we're looking at a business model. You know, one of the things I've been playing around with is my bookcase doors. I don't know, I've told everyone about this on the podcast, but I always wanted to be Batman, you know, since I was a kid.

And a year and a bit ago we started talking about, oh, we should create our own bookcase doors now in the US, they're called Murphy doors. They're pretty cool. There's other brands over in Europe that do this differently. And I was like New Zealand, we're just too small. These companies are never going to come here. It's just not viable.

They're just too, we're just too little a market. There's only 5 million people here and we're very spread out, so transport becomes a pain. There's a heap of negatives. But for a small company that can do it well and efficiently and use AI, there's a chance for an OK business. It's not going to be a game changer. It's not going to be our we're a multi trillionaire company.

It's it's kind of a small, it's a big player in a small, small area, if that makes sense. But for one player to do it, well, there is money to be made. I think personally, I don't think you could, It could sustain too many incumbents. But hey, who knows. So I've been putting together this business. We, I had my first door installed the other day.

We, we built it with an engineer who's brilliant. And we're going to be using AI to see what we can do around building a business model that works where we, we contract the manufacturer out and the installation and we run the brands, the product, the model and everything. So kind of turned it into like a franchise kind of licensee kind of situation. I'm not going to go too much detail into that, but what I'm trying to explain is the different side of thinking is that for this to work for us, we can use AI and my my understanding of business to create websites in this niche to bring in sales, to use AI to close sales even and to help us with like product documentation. You luckily we've got a good engineer on board who's doing a lot of that side of things. But we can use AI to supplement a business which may have had to have 5 or 10 staff in the past.

This may work fine with three staff, AI and some software, you know, for the core business, which would never have worked in the past, we'd have had to have a couple of extra people doing other things which then may have not actually made the business, you know, feasible. If it cost another 100 and 5200 grand a year to run, that would have really eaten into the profit line. And so this business is actually potentially become more feasible due to these changes. And then it comes down to my understanding of models and how, how can we do this in a way that doesn't involve a huge amount of capital, but gets a good result. And this is just one idea. So there are thousands of these ideas floating around and you can do, you can do a bunch of them with just creating quite a small niche business that that works.

Something that you're passionate about, something that you're interested in, something that you'll follow through with. Because that's always the key with the stakes here in ADHD entrepreneurs is are you going to follow through? You know, and This is why I still believe like I put like people say, there's going to be a lot of one man band businesses floating around. I think there will 100% be a few of those. But you know, all the years I've been around, even though I've had my issues with business partners, and that's a whole another podcast about picking the right partners, making sure you've got agreements in place, shareholder agreements and stuff, which again, can be written by AI and helped out. Like there's a heap of stuff now that if you understand it, you can do it.

Like in the old days, getting, you know, a little aside here, but if you bring on a business partner to get a shareholder agreement would have taken a lot of work. You can now with an hour and an afternoon and AI write something that works, you know, something that's a lot better than what most people would have had. And so you can actually do some of the stuff that was usually missed. I've had partnerships where we never wrote a shareholder agreement. It just seemed too expensive and hard. Now we can get it done and at least there's some protection in in the system, but I truly think there's going to be a lot of two to three man businesses floating around because I still think it's good to have someone other than AI to bounce things off against.

AI still makes a few mistakes. It also 100% gives you confidence to go in a direction that I don't always think works. I've noticed this with health. If you really, if you start to, it starts to mirror a lot of what you tell it. Occasionally it'll call you up, but very rarely. So you got to be very careful with using it as your strategic advisor.

Even to this day, you got to remember it is still a piece of software that's there to help you. Tactically. I think it's brilliant. Tactically, AI is stunning. Strategically, it can help you flesh your stuff out. But I wouldn't let it make decisions for you.

I think more people are going to get harmed and helped. This is my take on it at the moment. And again, remember, I'm talking about this as of today. The world is changing at such a pace that this podcast could be completely irrelevant in 6 to 12 months time. But at this moment, I, I could see like if I was, if I was coming out of college right now, I would be finding a business partner and I'd be starting something because you can do it. Even if you're in college.

It's never been a bit of time to just start something and get it going because you can turn something around so quickly. And if you've got the confidence, you've got nothing to worry about. But yeah, that's what I wanted to share today. Guys. This is my thinking about business and the state of the nation. I think this is across a lot of Western countries at the moment.

I'd love to hear your thoughts. Reach out to the thanks to entrepreneur. com websites up and running. I'm starting to get my branding all tidied up. Follow me on LinkedIn and other places. I'm doing a bit more on LinkedIn at the moment.

Have an epic rest your day and I'll be back next week. Thank you for listening to today's podcast on the truth about dyslexia. If you're looking for a group of awesome humans to help you with ADHD, dyslexia and the neurodivergent brain, maybe The Right Brain Resetters is for you. You can find us at rightbrainresetters. com and for just $7. 00 a month you can join our amazing group where you'll get Q&A's.

You're going to get little mini courses and heaps of stuff. It's way more value than you will invest in joining, so make sure you head to rightbrainresetters com and we'll put the link in the show notes.